There is a good deal to be said against these two lines. For one thing I am not sure that the mud ought to be yellow; it will remind people of Covent Garden Tube Station, and no one wants to be reminded of that. However, it does suggest the inexpressible biliousness of the theme.
I think “levels” is a little weak. It is a good poetical word and doesn’t mean anything in particular; but we have too many words of that kind in this verse. “Deserts” would do, except that deserts and mud don’t go very well together. However, that sort of point must be left to the individual writer.
At first sight the student may think that “nakedly” is not a good rhyme for “sea.” Nor is it. If you do that kind of thing in comic poetry no Editor will give you money. But in serious poetry it is quite legitimate; in fact it is rather encouraged. That is why serious poetry is so much easier than comic poetry. In my next lecture I shall deal with comic poetry.
I don’t think I shall finish this poem now. The fact is, I am not feeling so inspired as I was. It is very hot. Besides, I have got hay-fever and keep on sneezing. Constant sneezing knocks all the inspiration out of a man. At the same time a tendency to hay-fever is a sign of intellect and culture, and all the great poets were martyrs to it. That is why none of them grew very lyrical about hay. Corn excited them a good deal, and even straw, but hay hardly ever.
So the student must finish this poem as best he can, and I shall be glad to consider and criticize what he does, though I may say at once that there will be no prize. It ought to go on for another eight verses or so, though that is not essential in these days, for if it simply won’t go on it can just stop in the middle. Only then it must be headed “Mud: A Fragment.”
And in any case, in the bottom left-hand corner, the student must write:
Chintonbury, May 28th, 1920.
II
In this lecture I propose to explain how comic poetry is written.
Comic poetry, as I think I pointed out in my last lecture, is much more difficult than serious poetry, because there are all sorts of rules. In serious poetry there are practically no rules, and what rules there are may be shattered with impunity as soon as they become at all inconvenient. Rhyme, for instance. A well-known Irish poet once wrote a poem which ran like this:—